A technology that uses a simulation to calculate a three-dimensional model having equally spaced discrete points has been used for the analysis of an electromagnetic wave or the like. A finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is a widely known way of analyzing three-dimensional electromagnetic waves. In the method, Maxwell's equations are solved using a difference method with respect to space and time. Because discrete points in an electric field and discrete points in a magnetic field are calculated using change of time in the FDTD method, all the results are stored as result data (i.e., result data on “space×storage”).
Suppose, for example, a case where the range of a model to be analyzed has 100×100×100 discrete points, and the range is calculated with 10-femtosecond (fsec) increments for 10 nanoseconds (nsec). Then, the number of pieces of data to be stored becomes 100×100×100×1,000,000 steps, which is equal to 1012 pieces.
The result data on each point is formed with X, Y, Z coordinates in the electric field and X, Y, Z coordinates in the magnetic field. If each data is float-type 4-byte data, then 4 bytes×3 (directions)×2 (electric field/magnetic field) or 24 bytes in total is required to store the result data on each point. Therefore, 24×1012 bytes or 24 terabytes (T bytes), which is calculated from the number of the pieces of the discrete data and the required data area for each point, is required to store all the calculated result data.
It is clear from the calculation that a remarkably large resource is required to store all the calculated result data. As such a large resource is required, technology has been used to skip a part of the target data to be analyzed and then analyze the post-skipping data or technology has been used to set a skipping condition concerning the calculated result data to be skipped before the analysis.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 05-73649 discloses a technology that analyzes post-skipping data by skipping a part of the target data to be analyzed by referring to a feature and level of importance. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 05-282407 discloses a technology that sets the skipping condition by combining adjacent elements, thereby skipping the calculated result data.
The problem with the technology that analyzes the post-skipping data is that, because the target data to be analyzed is subjected to data skipping, accuracy of the analyzing process decreases. Furthermore, the problem with the technology that sets the skipping condition is that some pieces of the result data (e.g., data on a border between different media) cannot be restored properly.